Room to Play

by Simen Johan, Lyle Rexer

My photographs are composites of multiple-image fragments that I digitally manipulate and combine, including both images that I have photographed myself and found images. By combining different elements, my objective is to create artificial scenarios that appear vaguely familiar and produce numerous associations. I want to evoke a sense of familiarity that will seduce the viewer into allowing his or her own experience, imagination, and understanding of existing popular imagery to become tools for interpreting my work. Simen Johan The power and pathos of Johan's images springs from his intuitions about the texture of childhood experience and from his method. He works in collage, the technique at the heart of Surrealism. Collage frees him to walk the world with his camera and receive its impossible permissions. Something ordinary will strike him -- a driveway, an abandoned house by the side of the road, a woman's cheek - and he will shoot it, or sample it digitally if it comes from another source, and file it in his electronic unconscious (the computer). Children, dolls, and the peculiar constructions at the heart of his photographs (Dolls stuffed with meat and bird corpses, among others) Johan usually photographs in his studio. How he assembles these elements into digital tableaus is the mystery, and the process of adding, subtracting and recombining can be lengthy. "I don't finish quickly." he has remarked. Discards are strewn along his digital highway. Lyle Rexer

Hardcover

First published August 1, 2002